Hello! My name is Aniko! All of my life I knew that one day I am going to be a successful artist, but many life circumstances tried to push me off course and tried to make me do other things for a living. My parents always wanted me to have a well-paid job and as a teenager I listened to them, although it was hard for me to reject my dreams of just being a free spirit and make beautiful things for others.
Over 6 years ago I graduated as an interior designer and architect’s assistant and straight after that I moved to London, UK. I only used my educational skills during my studies and I worked in a few interior design and architecture companies. It never fascinated me, so as soon as I graduated, I never came back to my primary profession. Ever!
Apart from painting and crafting, I had a craze about Photoshop and photo manipulations, which I had practiced as a hobby since I was 14. Surprisingly, this exact hobby got me my very first job in London and kept me employed for the next 5 years. Parallel to that I had established my little handmade crafting business from home and discovered polymer clay and sculpting. First as a hobby and then with much more professional attitude, sculpting very quickly took over my whole life and became visible to other crafters in social media. But it wasn’t enough to survive on and even if I was already a World known artist and had quite a big following of my fellow crafters, it never reflected on my wallet. I had to be a “Boring Day Job girl” during the day and an artist in the evenings and weekends!
Then, in May 2015 came out a post about my journals here on Bored Panda. Literary in 1 day I gained thousands and thousands of new likes, e-mails, questions, requests, interviews, reposts on other viral websites and in 1-2 week’s time I was booked for the next 6 months upfront to make clay journals and jewelry for all those wonderful people who saw me on Bored Panda and appreciated my work.
I quit my day job in a Fashion Studio almost instantly after this successful publication and never looked back. This is what I’ve been waiting for all that time! I worked in a fashion studio as a photo retoucher before and you may say that this is an amazing job in itself, but all I can say is that my dreams laid elsewhere… in making BEAUTIFUL and most importantly MEANINGFUL THINGS for other people and give my love and blessings to them this way! You can’t even imagine how happy it makes me to receive photos of people who received my creations as a gift, and to hear stories of my clients who often say that tears of happiness appear on their eyes when they unwrap their packages and discover their ordered items inside!
All of the pictures below are the artworks I made after Bored Panda promoted my art (2015 and early 2016, except the frog and owl ones). I am eternally grateful to Bored Panda team for giving me this chance. This is priceless! THANK YOU SO MUCH!
More info: Etsy | mandarin-duck.com | Youtube
Fox’s Family Journal
“Mother’s Love” journal was made for the Giraffe Conservation Organisation
I even made a tutorial on how to make a journal like this yourself.
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